It's Not Me Onstage But I'm Also Not You or Playing At Being A Real Person

In an ideal world, docu-dramas and documentaries would simply present the facts and let the audience decide for themselves. However, I believe this is an impossible aim. As Mike pointed out in class: even in a documentary, there is a director shaping what you see and don’t see. The “dark matter” of the story points left out of a documentary says almost as much about the story being told as those deemed important enough to be included.

            Docu-dramas and verbatim theatre fail to succeed in remaining impartial (in my eyes) for the same reason: the playwright chooses what to include and what to leave out. They choose the format in which the story is laid out. They choose how to present each detail to the audience. It is the playwright, rather than the subject, that has the control. But there is an added layer of distance in theatre: the actors. I don’t care how good of an actor you are, you are still inherently yourself and therefore onstage you are still you “playing” another person. It doesn’t matter that that person exists for real in the world: you are not that person.

            In the mid 2000s I saw a play called Nine Parts of Desire. The play, written by Iraqi-American Heather Raffo, is a one-woman show in which a female actor depicts nine different Iraqi women. Raffo spent months interviewing different women in order to accumulate material for the piece. Though not billed as a “docu-drama” per say, there was no denying the truth of the women’s experiences.

            Two important things jump out at me from my memory of this production. The first is that the woman I saw perform the play was not Iraqi (yay for overlap into this weeks readings!). Her performance was stellar and her transformations between each woman were specific and drastic. Her dialect work was on point. Amiriyah shelter bombing. My mind would not fully believe that she was an Iraqi street peddler who had lived through all of the political turmoil in her country. She was always a white woman (admittedly one that I knew outside of the theatre) doing a very good Iraqi accent. She may have even looked the part, with her olive skin and charcoal lined eyes. But she was not Iraqi. Automatically the piece lost some of the impact because none of these stories could believably be hers. My mind would not believe that she was an Iraqi woman who had lost her entire family in the

            The second thing that jumped out at me was that the play was written before the United States invaded Iraq. Though Raffo later went back and added characters who were obviously political or in direct response to the Iraq invasion, several of the pieces are simple depictions of Iraqi women dealing with issues that are not specific to Iraq but are issues woman around the world would identify with. Yet the change in the political climate, the change in the relationship of the world and Iraq at the time of the plays release (and especially at the time of my viewing) made the piece inherently political.

            So here I am at the end of my blog and still I think that verbatim theatre cannot be used as a sort of theatrical newspaper because there is still performance. There are still layers of interpretation placed, perhaps unintentionally but there they are, between the truth and what the audience sees. Still I think there is value in depicting true events. It is how we have kept our histories alive for centuries, after all.